 Researchers at Rice University have worked out how to camouflage your heartbeats from unwanted surveillance with “biometric decoys.” Wait, what? Excuse me, you ask, why might I soon want to camouflage my heartbeat? Remote heart rate monitoring is just one of many threats to privacy emerging from the mushrooming field of biometric tracking. This common, everyday technology ranges from radar-based imaging used for facial authentication to wearables that monitor signals like heart rate variability, respiration, temperature, steps, calories ingested, and the quality of your sleep cycles. Biometric tracking is designed to make everyday life safer and easier, telling you how much of your last night was spent in deep, light, and REM sleep, or whether your heartbeat is showing signs of arrhythmia. In today’s world, however, no good data feed goes unexploited. Off-the-shelf devices such as millimeter-wave radars can be used to eavesdrop on phone conversations and monitor daily movement patterns. They can also be used to monitor subtler signals like breathing and heart rate to gauge your stress, activity, or emotional state. “Sensing technologies are becoming higher resolution and more pervasive, and concerns around what that means for privacy should be taken seriously,” said Edward Knightly, the senior researcher on the study. “It is important to explore potential vulnerabilities and think about how we might address them.” Despite the benefits of biometric monitoring, as with almost all new technologies it comes with a privacy downside. Without policy or legal guardrails, employers might soon monitor your heart rate as soon as you log into your work computer. Or imagine how a negotiator might exploit the knowledge that the person on the other side of the table had a terrible night’s sleep. The complete study was published in the journal Computer Communications via ScienceDirect. And none too soon, given that the market for biometric systems (and their highly desirable data) is expected to roughly double between now and 2030. So it is not too early to worry about such things – as technology can change in a heartbeat. Comments are closed.
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